Northwest Lit. Schtick

April 1998
T H E RaVEN C H R O N I C L E S

`Pacific Northwest Urban Writing`

THE THREAD: Northwest Lit. Schtick

Paul Hunter:
pablo@zipcon.com

Sorry I've been too busy catching back up to get onto the threaded discussion. Regionalism is a matter of both common subject matter and common influences. There are no towering literary giants around that NW writers all acknowledge and emulate, and the misty nature writing that was indeed prevalent when I got here in the 60's is by now but a distant and precious memory. Then too there has been an incredible influx of talented writers from other parts of the world, who have moved here in mid-career, and continue to write out of experience rooted elsewhere in the world. So maybe it's all moot. I do like the urban NW scene, and enjoy seeing how those transplants are changed in subtle ways by this bourgeois and never-totally-trendy place.

Paul

Bill Shively:
shively@spiritone.com
12/10/97

Let's see, as I sort of thought this lit hit list was about the regional voice, it surprises me that the discussion has wandered so far, seemingly, afield, (or as Uncle Wally would have it, a hill). Perhaps one cannot have regionalism without quotes, but that's okay too. Read the quotes in where you need them. Maybe our optic nerve doesn't exist without quotes, either.

It just might be that the same quotes are everywhere, so we could go ahead and discuss our regionalism in comparison to their regionalism and have a somewhat vital exchange of ideas about the urban voices (Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, Olympia, Anchorage, Juneau, "Spokane", ...?) ("Spokane" of course is in quotes.), and how their expressions are unique/distinct.

To that return, I posit that the bleak, the sad, depressed, anxious, uncertain, of the northwest urban, is the heart of its regional voice: postmodern or not.... The source of this Noir is the rain on the city.

I am not saying that we write about rain (though we do) or that we make novels about rain (though we do) or that movies are imbued with rain (though some are) or that the theater is rooted in rain (though I have gotten soaked going to the theater). Cobain is not just rain.

Other regions have rain. This region relishes rain. Proclaims rain. Suffers unlike others because of the rain. The long gray rain.

always shively

Stephen Thomas:
stevent@u.washington.edu
12/11/97

M. Briggs, I think I've been a bit of an asshole. When I first entered into the string I wanted to puncture through what I was seeing as too much verbiage to a core: we work. Obviously you were trying to initiate a discussion that I was not prepared to engage in. Obviously we respond to the world in personal ways and what could be more local than a person, considering that wherever you go there you are.

Anyway it has come to me that I was practicing a little aggression therapy on my personal, local problems in cyber-space. As that Jersey poet would have said if her were rewriting Stephen Crane: "Forgive me/ it was delicious/ so bitter/ and so/ my own."

Stephen Thomas

P. Bosche:
bosche@u.washington.edu
12/12/97

A friend of mine, a local female poet, sent a brief comment on this issue to me: "You know, I'm thinking there really isn't a Seattle urban style. Urban subjects, yes, but not a style. The Asian forms have mostly influenced people outside the city writing about what's being called "Nature," including non-Asians like Snyder, Hamill, McNulty, etc. And "urban" sorts of styles I've seen could be from any city (like airports are all alike). But then I'm not really connected with the work of folks who would be called urban writers, not being one myself. I mean, I live in the city, but I'm not a city person."

Like my friend, for a lot of folks/writers who have settled here, "Urban" (now that is a word that needs to be in quotes) has a nasty connotation, versus the perceived ideal sense of how life should be lived. Urban=technology. These are the writers who don't like the sound of a crow, many who are of the Poetry Northwest milieu. (Now I myself love the crow's raucous full-throated croak. He challenges the humans he has to share his food and shelter with--and he doesn't often back down. I admire city dwelling beings that have adapted to urban environments.)

Matt Briggs:
mbriggs@fhcrc.org
12/11/97

Urban/Suburban, many of the people live now in these new, gigantic suburbs, and I think this explosive growth is part of what defines the region's writing. It's not just the difference between a big city and a gigantic city, but large towns now exist where no one even lived twenty years ago. My family used to buy our chickens in Redmond. The utter exploitation of natural resources hasn't been a gradual thing in the Northwest. Since the 1940s, we've chopped down every acre of lumber, filled up every mile of beach front with houses, and filled in almost all of the bottomland with garbage and supermalls. Even people who moved to the Northwest seeking that whatever personal utopia they had in mind in the upper left hand corner of the map, now live in places like Tukwilla, Paulsbo, and Puyallup.

I think there is a very active urban writing vein that is developing in Seattle/Portland/Vancouver that is specific to this region. The rhetoric of it hasn't solidified yet - but it pretty much makes mince, thank god, out of what Paul Hunter called "misty nature writing that dominated the writing here in the 1960's." BUT I also think these writers haven't really gained a wide readership yet. People talk about Jesse Bernstein, Stacey Levine, but they're not exactly selling out at Barnes & Noble. Charles D'Ambrosio hasn't even published a novel yet. And there's a great deal of abstraction/fantasy to some of this writing that displaces an obvious sense of place. While Gregory Hischak, Jack Remick, Ron Dakron, Willie Smith, SP Makowski, Rebecca Brown may be Seattleites (even if they are from other places), and their stories may not really feature a lot of specific localities as far as street names and places, they do share a similar attention to language (sometimes sort of funny and loose as in Willie Smith and Ron Dakron and sometimes obsessively intricate and academic, Rebecca Brown), and they feature characters who are losers and freaks and unsuccessful. And the rain always comes in somewhere in there, even though it doesn't actually rain here too much, it often looks like it is about to rain on moss-covered cement.

Matt

Arthur Tulee:
brnzlvis@speakeasy.org
12/13/97

I like all the points made so far. I sensed awareness of past writers and their work, an appreciation for current writers and trends, but also restraint, diffidence, and even discontinuity - but also a split badge, an either/ or subscription to "sub/urban" enclaves or "nature" camps.

Phoebe's replies gave me an idea.

I'd like to see what happens when your subscriptions come together. When your "civilization" spreads out, or when your "nature" reclaims its due. When coyotes infiltrate your government building, when Bill Gates buys another lot of chicken farms for his daily expansion.

When El Nino makes for us El Tiempo mas tropicale, when Phoebe can sunworship this far north.

When fertilizer is laced with poisons and toxins and yet we eat the crops harvested in that stuff.

When Tahoma (Mt. Rainier) wakes up to find her land and air and water tainted with unnatural things and decides to clean her plate.

I want to read and hear your apprehension/expectation/witness/rebuttal/approval/regret/ pride/palliatives/emuscation for all these collisions.

We have met Pac NW Regionalism (in quotes) and it is us.

Jim Andrews:
JimA@TechWave.com
12/14/97 5:35 PM

Matt,

Q: How many monkeys does it take to catch your own tail?

A: As many as you can get to chase it.

© The Raven Chronicles 1998

	April 1998		T H E RaVEN C H R O N I C L E S

	`Pacific Northwest Urban Writing`		THE THREAD: Northwest Lit. Schtick Paul Hunter: pablo@zipcon.com Sorry I've been too busy catching back up to get onto the threaded discussion. Regionalism is a matter of both common subject matter and common influences. There are no towering literary giants around that NW writers all acknowledge and emulate, and the misty nature writing that was indeed prevalent when I got here in the 60's is by now but a distant and precious memory. Then too there has been an incredible influx of talented writers from other parts of the world, who have moved here in mid-career, and continue to write out of experience rooted elsewhere in the world. So maybe it's all moot. I do like the urban NW scene, and enjoy seeing how those transplants are changed in subtle ways by this bourgeois and never-totally-trendy place. Paul Bill Shively: shively@spiritone.com 12/10/97 Let's see, as I sort of thought this lit hit list was about the regional voice, it surprises me that the discussion has wandered so far, seemingly, afield, (or as Uncle Wally would have it, a hill). Perhaps one cannot have regionalism without quotes, but that's okay too. Read the quotes in where you need them. Maybe our optic nerve doesn't exist without quotes, either. It just might be that the same quotes are everywhere, so we could go ahead and discuss our regionalism in comparison to their regionalism and have a somewhat vital exchange of ideas about the urban voices (Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, Olympia, Anchorage, Juneau, "Spokane", ...?) ("Spokane" of course is in quotes.), and how their expressions are unique/distinct. To that return, I posit that the bleak, the sad, depressed, anxious, uncertain, of the northwest urban, is the heart of its regional voice: postmodern or not.... The source of this Noir is the rain on the city. I am not saying that we write about rain (though we do) or that we make novels about rain (though we do) or that movies are imbued with rain (though some are) or that the theater is rooted in rain (though I have gotten soaked going to the theater). Cobain is not just rain. Other regions have rain. This region relishes rain. Proclaims rain. Suffers unlike others because of the rain. The long gray rain. always shively Stephen Thomas: stevent@u.washington.edu 12/11/97 M. Briggs, I think I've been a bit of an asshole. When I first entered into the string I wanted to puncture through what I was seeing as too much verbiage to a core: we work. Obviously you were trying to initiate a discussion that I was not prepared to engage in. Obviously we respond to the world in personal ways and what could be more local than a person, considering that wherever you go there you are. Anyway it has come to me that I was practicing a little aggression therapy on my personal, local problems in cyber-space. As that Jersey poet would have said if her were rewriting Stephen Crane: "Forgive me/ it was delicious/ so bitter/ and so/ my own." Stephen Thomas P. Bosche: bosche@u.washington.edu 12/12/97 A friend of mine, a local female poet, sent a brief comment on this issue to me: "You know, I'm thinking there really isn't a Seattle urban style. Urban subjects, yes, but not a style. The Asian forms have mostly influenced people outside the city writing about what's being called "Nature," including non-Asians like Snyder, Hamill, McNulty, etc. And "urban" sorts of styles I've seen could be from any city (like airports are all alike). But then I'm not really connected with the work of folks who would be called urban writers, not being one myself. I mean, I live in the city, but I'm not a city person." Like my friend, for a lot of folks/writers who have settled here, "Urban" (now that is a word that needs to be in quotes) has a nasty connotation, versus the perceived ideal sense of how life should be lived. Urban=technology. These are the writers who don't like the sound of a crow, many who are of the Poetry Northwest milieu. (Now I myself love the crow's raucous full-throated croak. He challenges the humans he has to share his food and shelter with--and he doesn't often back down. I admire city dwelling beings that have adapted to urban environments.) Matt Briggs: mbriggs@fhcrc.org 12/11/97 Urban/Suburban, many of the people live now in these new, gigantic suburbs, and I think this explosive growth is part of what defines the region's writing. It's not just the difference between a big city and a gigantic city, but large towns now exist where no one even lived twenty years ago. My family used to buy our chickens in Redmond. The utter exploitation of natural resources hasn't been a gradual thing in the Northwest. Since the 1940s, we've chopped down every acre of lumber, filled up every mile of beach front with houses, and filled in almost all of the bottomland with garbage and supermalls. Even people who moved to the Northwest seeking that whatever personal utopia they had in mind in the upper left hand corner of the map, now live in places like Tukwilla, Paulsbo, and Puyallup. I think there is a very active urban writing vein that is developing in Seattle/Portland/Vancouver that is specific to this region. The rhetoric of it hasn't solidified yet - but it pretty much makes mince, thank god, out of what Paul Hunter called "misty nature writing that dominated the writing here in the 1960's." BUT I also think these writers haven't really gained a wide readership yet. People talk about Jesse Bernstein, Stacey Levine, but they're not exactly selling out at Barnes & Noble. Charles D'Ambrosio hasn't even published a novel yet. And there's a great deal of abstraction/fantasy to some of this writing that displaces an obvious sense of place. While Gregory Hischak, Jack Remick, Ron Dakron, Willie Smith, SP Makowski, Rebecca Brown may be Seattleites (even if they are from other places), and their stories may not really feature a lot of specific localities as far as street names and places, they do share a similar attention to language (sometimes sort of funny and loose as in Willie Smith and Ron Dakron and sometimes obsessively intricate and academic, Rebecca Brown), and they feature characters who are losers and freaks and unsuccessful. And the rain always comes in somewhere in there, even though it doesn't actually rain here too much, it often looks like it is about to rain on moss-covered cement. Matt Arthur Tulee: brnzlvis@speakeasy.org 12/13/97 I like all the points made so far. I sensed awareness of past writers and their work, an appreciation for current writers and trends, but also restraint, diffidence, and even discontinuity - but also a split badge, an either/ or subscription to "sub/urban" enclaves or "nature" camps. Phoebe's replies gave me an idea. I'd like to see what happens when your subscriptions come together. When your "civilization" spreads out, or when your "nature" reclaims its due. When coyotes infiltrate your government building, when Bill Gates buys another lot of chicken farms for his daily expansion. When El Nino makes for us El Tiempo mas tropicale, when Phoebe can sunworship this far north. When fertilizer is laced with poisons and toxins and yet we eat the crops harvested in that stuff. When Tahoma (Mt. Rainier) wakes up to find her land and air and water tainted with unnatural things and decides to clean her plate. I want to read and hear your apprehension/expectation/witness/rebuttal/approval/regret/ pride/palliatives/emuscation for all these collisions. We have met Pac NW Regionalism (in quotes) and it is us. Jim Andrews: JimA@TechWave.com 12/14/97 5:35 PM Matt, Q: How many monkeys does it take to catch your own tail? A: As many as you can get to chase it.
			© The Raven Chronicles 1998